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Inner cabinet meets after Israel reportedly pressured to respond to Washington demands. While Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu convened his six senior ministers on Wednesday night to discuss the crisis with Washington, US President Barack Obama on Wednesday said the US-Israeli relationship is not in crisis over the approval of an east Jerusalem building plan during US vice President Joe Biden's visit to Israel,. Obama told Fox News Channel that the new housing units "weren't helpful" in carving out a peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but that Washington remains a committed ally for Israel. The expansion of Ramat Shlomo was a...

JERUSALEM — Israeli officials said Monday that the U.S. is pressing Israel to scrap a contentious east Jerusalem building project whose approval has touched off the most serious diplomatic feud with Washington in years. Competing Israeli and Palestinian claims to east Jerusalem were feeding tensions in the holy city, where Arabs and Jews maintain an uneasy coexistence and sometimes clash. Police were out in large numbers in the volatile Old City in expectation of renewed clashes. Top U.S. officials have lined up in recent days to condemn the Israeli plan to build 1,600 apartments in east Jerusalem, the sector of...

Israel has extended a lockdown on the occupied West Bank and restricted access to the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem as tensions soared over its latest settlement plans. Defence Minister Ehud Barak has extended until Tuesday at midnight the lockdown on the West Bank, which was due to end on Saturday night, because of a continued risk of attacks, an armed forces spokesman said. Israel sealed off the West Bank on Friday after the announcement that it planned to build new homes for Jewish settlers in mainly Arab east Jerusalem sparked a row with Washington and fuelled anger in...

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will not enter indirect peace talks with Israel as planned, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said overnight Wednesday, due to the approval of plans to build 1,600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo in east Jerusalem. “The Palestinian president has decided that he does not intend to enter negotiations at this stage,” Moussa said at a press conference in Cairo. A senior PA official in Ramallah had said Wednesday that the PA would resume talks with Israel in the coming days, despite the threats and strong condemnations coming from Ramallah. The official’s comments came after visiting...

In my article Can Israel be both democratic and Jewish. I wrote that one value must trump the other. "When these values are opposed to each other, one must trump the other. So the first question is which one trumps the other. If the legislation does so provide then that’s the end of it until new legislation says otherwise. In the absence of any such provision, the Courts would favour democracy because for them that is the most important value. The Knesset must so determine if it wants the highest value to be a Jewish state even if it violates...

The conviction that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal is now so commonly accepted, it hardly seems as though the matter is even open for discussion. But it is. Decades of argument about the issue have obscured the complex legal question about which a supposedly overwhelming verdict of guilty has been rendered against settlement policy. There can be no doubt that this avalanche of negative opinion has been deeply influenced by the settlements’ unpopularity around the world and even within Israel itself. Yet, while one may debate the wisdom of Israeli settlements, the idea that they are imprudent...

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli authorities could soon use special commando units, unmanned spy planes and cellphone-jamming equipment to enforce a moratorium on new settlement construction in the West Bank, military officials said Sunday, deepening a showdown between the government and Jewish settlers. Enraged settlers leaders vowed to resist the plan, prompting Defense Minister Ehud Barak to warn that settlers would face the full wrath of the military if they continue to flout the 10-month construction slowdown. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the settlement slowdown last month in an attempt to restart peace talks with the Palestinians. But the Palestinians...

Israel, A Nation Lost by Ari Bussel A prospective juror who is a priori prejudiced will, as a matter of course, be dismissed from serving on a jury pool. Many use this knowledge to be excused from jury service. Israel finds herself in the most peculiar position of always being found guilty before deliberations even begin. The World, itself Judge and Jury, stands and applauds: the harsher the treatment, the stronger the clapping. Israel’s Prime Minister decided to freeze all construction within Jewish settlements for ten months. This created an uproar, first because of the manner which it was done...

JERUSALEM -- Israel last year revoked the Jerusalem residency of more than 4,500 Palestinians, far more than in any other year since Israel took full control of the city in 1967, according to government figures obtained under the country's freedom of information act by a local human rights group. In what an official for the group on Wednesday called a "frightening" escalation in the enforcement of Jerusalem residency laws, the Interior Ministry said that a sweep of its files last spring turned up thousands of names of Palestinian Jerusalemites who had left the country for longer than the allowed seven...

Saturday, November 28, 2009 Finally, Israel Gets It! By Joseph Farah For more than five years, I have been conspicuously alone in pointing out the racist, anti-Jewish nature of policies that require the evacuation of Israelis from Gaza, Judea and Samaria and, more lately, the halts on building and repairing homes and businesses owned by Jews in Jerusalem. Finally, someone in Israel has figured this out and called the policies advocated by Barack Obama and the international elite what they are. "Israeli law does not discriminate between Jews, Muslims and Christians or between eastern and western Jerusalem," said Jerusalem Mayor...

US President Barack Obama is an extremely intelligent man surrounded by equally intelligent advisers, many of whom have years of experience dealing with the Middle East. His continued misreading and misunderstanding of the Israeli public is, therefore, somewhat baffling. This misread was evident again in the past few days by the US objection to the Jerusalem Municipal Planning Committee's approval of a plan to build some 900 new units in Gilo - not in a far-flung settlement overlooking Nablus, nor even in one of the settlement blocs like Gush Etzion, nor even a Jewish complex in one of the Arab...

With his typical left-wing arrogance, Tom Friedman of the New York Times says that Obama should drop his peace efforts and call a pox on both the Israeli and Palestinian houses because neither side is willing to negotiate. Friedman assumes that President Obama is an idiot who did not understand that peace is unattainable. I suggest a different scenario. President Obama has a lifetime's worth of anti-Israel sentiments, a cause for great suspicion for Jewish voters during the early part of the campaign. Before the economy collapsed, the Jewish vote was moving away from Obama. In the end it was...

President Obama's Middle East policy is in ruins. While the US continues to press Israel for a settlement freeze (and a freeze on Jerusalem) his strategy is falling apart piece by piece. He has turned the Israeli populace against him and strengthened the hand of Prime Minister Netanyahu. At the same time he has eroded his own support among American Jews and other US friends of Israel. Which is why he has pressured political hacks such as Congressman Steve Israel to lend their names to the Anti-Israel Group, J-Street. The Arab League nations answered no to the Presidents request for...

By Ted Belman Hillary Clinton recently said, "And the Obama Administration's position on settlements is clear, unequivocal. It has not changed. And as the President has said on many occasions, the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." That may well be his position but it has not always been the position of the US and its presidents. In 1995, The Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine and Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies co-hosted a June 2 symposium on "Settlements and Peace: The Problem of Jewish Colonization in Palestine." Geoffrey Aronson of the Foundation...

It was just two days ago that the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a statement that seemed to indicate that the US Government was throwing in the towel on its unreasonable demands regarding Israeli Settlements. Clinton praised Netanyahu, saying that "what the Prime Minister has offered... a restraint on the policy of settlements, which he has just described, no new starts, for example, is unprecedented in the context of prior to negotiations." She also said that Israel's freezing construction "has never been a precondition [for negotiations], it has always been an issue within the negotiations." Today Clinton seemed to...

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Saturday night rejected Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's demand that Israel freeze all settlement activity as a precondition to negotiations. Stopping construction in the settlements "has never been a precondition, it has always been an in issue within the negotiations," Clinton said at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. In a strong show of support for Israel, she said she approved of Netanyahu's decision to issue a moratorium on new construction permits. "What the prime minister has offered... a restraint on the policy of settlements, which he...

Mohammed Dahlan, the former Fatah leader in Gaza and a senior PA legislator, told Israeli Radio listeners Sunday that a Jewish presence in eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria is equivalent to Arab terrorist suicide bombings. "What is the difference between blowing up a bus in Tel Aviv and taking over Palestinian land?" he asked rhetorically. Dahlan also warned Israel that violent riots in the capital will continue as long as Jews visit the Temple Mount, which was re-opened to Jews on Sunday.

If you listen to President Obama and much of the world, Jewish settlers who live on the West Bank of the Jordan Creek (River) are the most evil people in the world (if you have ever seen the Jordan River you would call it a creek too). The world community over-reacts to fake Arab claims of ill treatment with-in the Pre-1967 borders of Israel. The fact is Arabs are allowed to live anywhere in Israel, but God-forbid a Jew decides to live on land that was once the property of the diminutive King of Jordan, and somehow that is evil....

(IsraelNN.com) Security forces on Friday destroyed the first hareidi-religious outpost in Samaria, Givat Sefer, just hours before the Sabbath. The site of the budding community is located next to the hareidi-religious city of Kiryat Sefer.

Yesterday Pres Obama addressed the UNGA on the subject of the conflict between Arabs and Jews conflict and had this to say; ...I will also continue to seek a just and lasting peace between Israel, Palestine, and the Arab world. What is noteworthy here, is that he referred to "Palestine" like it was a state already. Is that not pre-judging the outcome? He also wants there to be peace with the "Arab world" which means more pressure on Israel to cave to the demands of Syria. Palestinians have strengthened their efforts on security. Israelis have facilitated greater freedom of movement...